


If It's the Beaches

by Coriopaxi



Category: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (TV)
Genre: #bunchofplimptons, Angst, Anxiety, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Pining, season 3 has me WORKED UP, stand back I'm going to mash these two broken puzzle pieces together
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-28
Updated: 2017-11-28
Packaged: 2019-02-08 01:46:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12854082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Coriopaxi/pseuds/Coriopaxi
Summary: It’s the morning after the morning after the masquerade. Nathaniel is the crazy one.





	1. Always improving, never a loser; always improving, never a loser

**Author's Note:**

> My first fic ever. I have feelings(!!!) about this ship - and about Nathaniel as a character - that I needed to write down before episode 3. 
> 
> [I started this before S3E3 came out, but AO3’s invite shutdown meant you’re only finally getting it now… but actually, so far, it’s basically canon-compliant. Which (c’mon!) is kind of impressive if I do say so myself.] 
> 
> The title comes from an Avett Brothers song that you should listen to immediately.

“If you help me destroy Josh Chan, I will let you do anything you want to me… and I mean anything.”

The image came unbidden, and not for the first time. A secret desire so embarrassing he’d be _ruined forever_ if word got out.

“Yes, that,” she simpered. “Whatever just crossed your mind. That. You’re telling me you don’t wanna do that?”

Yes, he did want to do that. He’d woken up every morning for weeks now wanting that and _only_ that. She would be standing at his wall of windows, looking out over the valley, and from behind her he would gently run one arm around her waist and the other across her chest, over her collarbones. Then he’d slowly draw the warm softness of her back against his beating heart. And they’d just stand there and breathe.

So anyway, in the end, he agreed to help her.

***

_You ruined everything, stupid._

He’s in his office now, the Monday morning after the masquerade. Perhaps 26 hours since she’d been in his bed. 25 hours since he undid the master plan to destroy the muggle. He texted her at noon yesterday to tell her it was all undone — Josh Chan’s Lolo is safe for now — but she never replied.

And now it’s 9 o’clock on Monday morning and Nathaniel’s running as if rabid dogs are giving chase. (It’s actually his second run of the day. He gave up trying to sleep at 5 a.m.; her perfume lingering in his sheets made every breath its own tiny hell.) Everyone in the Plimpton & Whitefeather office — and likely everyone in the office below — can hear him punishing himself on the treadmill. He knows this, but he tells himself that they admire his athleticism and dedication to fitness. That’s all this is. Running off the weekend’s calories while his employees pile on the maple-bacon donuts.

Because, OK, if something were bothering him, he’d just take care of it. He has enough money to solve any problem. Not that there’s a problem. Everything’s fine. They had sex. She left. It’s not a problem. It’s fine.

And even if it wasn’t fine — which it totally is! — he still needs to be professional today. He’s her boss and she’s his employee and, yes, they shared a little overtime this weekend but that’s done now. They completed their simple transaction and, OK, maybe he didn’t get exactly what he wanted, but they’d both fulfilled their agreement to the letter of the law and that’s all that matters. He’s an attorney. He understands contracts.

And even if he wanted it to be more than a simple transaction — which he didn’t(!) — he could just have it. Sex? He could definitely be having sex right now. He’s handsome, rich, young, powerful. He could snap his fingers and summon one (or many) of the gold-digging debutantes his father’s business connections insist on introducing. Or he could go to a club, flash his money around, silence the voice in his head with another meaningless night.

_But you don’t want another quick fuck. You want… you want… what exactly_ do _you want?_

He wants to make Rebecca Bunch happy, and it’s slowly driving him crazy. He drags a hand across his face and over his aching head, and nearly falls off the treadmill in the process.

It used to be _her_ treadmill.

_Run. Run. Don’t think about her. Run. Keep running._

It was the night in the elevator that did it, of course. Not the almost-kiss (though that had been… intense). Not even the actual kiss (a whole other level of intense). If he were honest with himself — difficult — it had been _her_ . Just her. Being friendly to him. Damn those _Winds of Diablo._ Fuck, he really was losing his mind if Karen’s crazy-eyed rambling was starting to make sense.

From the moment he confessed his love of Harry Potter and was rewarded with playful teasing instead of cold disapproval or worse yet, scorn, he knew he was in trouble. He had surprised her with this little tidbit about himself, and she, in turn, had surprised him right back with her enthusiasm. How could sharing such a stupid little piece of himself make him suddenly feel so much lighter?

_Because she didn’t call you weak._

He tried to think of the last time he’d felt a connection like that. Not with his father, obviously. Not with his Stanford “friends.” Certainly not with the debutantes, the water polo team or any number of powerful business associates.

All his life, everything has been a competition. His father, demanding a perfect son and heir to his legal empire. His prep school classmates, jostling for high test scores and academic accolades to reserve their places in the Ivy League. And then actually finding himself in undergrad and then law school, still fighting for every scrap of praise,  surrounded by guys well on their way to becoming just like his father. And God help him, he’s on his way there too. Maybe if he could just be a little more like the old man, then maybe he could finally take a break.

“Breaks are for the weak,” he says to his empty office.

(No, it doesn’t exactly take an Akopian to see what’s going on with him.)

He has to stop running.

_Not from your feelings, of course. Not that._

“Shut up,” he gasps between strides. “I’m not (gasp) running (gasp) from my feelings.”

No, he literally has to stop running before he falls off the treadmill and embarrasses himself again. He sprinted until he thought either his legs or lungs would give out. Then he kept jogging anyway. Then broke to a walk. And now — now, it’s either stop or faint.

But at the same time, he really, really doesn’t want to stop running. He has to do something to keep his body busy and his mind empty. Because every time he stops moving, Rebecca pours into his brain (a glitter explosion that’s half lava, half ice) to torture him.

Everyone in his life is hard edges. His father, a marble statue of a perpetual disapproval. The debutantes, all sharp manicures and jutting hip bones. His friends, a mass of tennis rackets, golf clubs and sports cars, ostensibly attached to men he likes.

But Rebecca has no sharp edges. The reality of her warm softness pressed against his skin had been too much and not nearly enough — all at once. The breathy, gentle sounds she made in the back of her throat when he —

_Stop thinking about her, you pathetic excuse for a man._

The sudden ache in his chest is probably a straightforward heart attack, nothing else. Easily overcome with willpower and more casework. He looks at his smartwatch. Yes, his heart is racing from the treadmill. His cardio is off the charts.

***

But two hours later, heart-rate long-since slowed, the ache is still there. And Rebecca still isn’t.

She hasn’t come in today, and he’s _not worried, thankyouverymuch,_ but dammit, she’s his employee. She needs to call in if she’s taking a personal day. She can’t just leave them all hanging like this when there’s so much to do and they need her. The other employees need her. Obviously.

Maybe he should go check on… call… text… her.

_What kind of senior partner personally calls when an employee is late? You have staff for this._

But of course he doesn’t think of her as an employee anymore. It’s just one of his many failures as a boss. He can hear his father’s stern lecture now: “The first step to a disciplined staff is a disciplined leader. You know who lacks discipline, son?” And then he’d pause, and Nathaniel would brace himself to hear something awful. “—Poor people! If you can’t control yourself and your staff, then you’re no better than a homeless, Nathaniel. And I won’t have _someone like that_ representing my firm.”

It doesn’t help that ethically, he has no ground to stand on. He’s a failure of a son already. But he’s also a failure of a manager letting his staff dictate their own hours and then _kissing her on company property_. Legally, well, it’s a good thing no one in the office does employment law. He was playing a very dangerous game falling in lo—

_No. Not that. Absolutely not._

But she isn’t exactly innocent either. She tried to kill him with a pen, after all. An involuntary smile curls the corners of his lips remembering her red-faced outrage that day. (Outraaaage, she would say. His smile falters. She said that in the elevator, in that fucking adorable old-timey voice. Why does everything have to go back to that stupid elevator? He vows to take the stairs from now on.)

It comes down to this. He’s not used to wanting. When money is no object _(A helicopter? Really?!)_ you don’t get much practice with wanting anything for long. And all the big decisions have been dictated by his father, anyway. His father wanted Stanford. His father wanted Whitefeather. Nathaniel has never needed to know what he wants because anytime there’s a decision in front of him, his father’s already told him what he’ll be doing.

And that was fine ( _no, really, fine_ ) until now. Now, without understanding how, and definitely without his consent, Rebecca has opened up a whole new universe of wanting in him where all the money and power and discipline in the world aren’t enough to fill the hole in his core.

_Have you considered shoplifting?_

The thing is, he’d done exactly what she asked. And he’d done it with style. Over-delivered, really, on the whole “destroy Josh Chan” thing. He’d been so gratified when she’d asked him for something that only he had the power to give. But somehow his efforts hadn’t pleased her. He’d given her exactly what she said she wanted, and somehow it still hadn’t made her happy.

_No matter how hard you try, you can’t make anyone happy._

“Happiness is for babies and the mentally deficient,” his Pop would say.

Josh Chan knew how to make Rebecca happy. He’d made her so happy she’d wanted to marry him. How had that sentient flip-flop gotten her to love him? What did she see in that guy? Why would you marry the arrogant asshole, James Potter, when your true equal is right there beside you — _Always_?

OK, so maybe not always. But he was here now.

Anger flashes through him. It isn’t just that Rebecca has loved Josh Chan for years. No, his resentment of Josh Chan is more than mere jealousy. He’s incensed by the thoughtless wastefulness of what Chan did to her: He hurt her. He knew how to make her happy; he could have made her happy; and he chose to do the opposite.

Josh Chan had the power to make Rebecca happy and Nathaniel still doesn’t. It’s just one more deficiency, one more failure in himself that he’ll have to overcome.

_Work harder._

It’s the only answer he knows, so it’s the one that’ll have to do.


	2. The Alligator

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fallout from the Trentvelope. Further pining.

Guilt.

Regret.

Fear. 

Longing.

More guilt.

Protectiveness. That one was new.

Really, all of them were still new. It was like one day he had been an impenetrable fortress of professional competence; the next, his walls began to crack. He’d felt a trickle of warmth seeping through his walls every time he was near her. And now? Well, tonight it felt like he was drinking his feelings from a firehose. And every second she was gone the water got deeper.

_ It’s just an infatuation. The thrill of the chase. Pull yourself together. _

Of course he knows that it’s only an infatuation. They haven’t spent nearly enough time together, getting to know each other as people, for it to more than that. No matter what his pounding heart is telling him, his brain knows better. This crush will pass and he’ll look back on these days with a mix of embarrassment and relief that it didn’t go any further.

But it doesn’t feel that way right now. Right now the most painful pieces of Rebecca’s past are spread out in front of him in black and white and he wants nothing more than to stand beside her and help face down her demons.

He’s a lawyer, so he grasps the pertinent facts very quickly. But he’s also a man in — ahem — he also  _ has feelings for _ her. And he has no trouble seeing past the legal and medical language in this file to the woman he knows. (Thought he knew.) (Wishes he knew.)

What the file tells him, more than anything else, is that if he ever tells Rebecca about his feelings again, he’d better mean it. He’d better be absolutely sure. Because there’s not much heart left to break there, and he doesn’t want to be the one who shatters it for good.

_ Why would she care about how you feel? She obviously doesn’t. She just used you as a means to an end. You can’t break a heart she isn’t interested in giving you. _

What the file tells him is that she is not a fortress and never has been. Apparently every man in her life has taken advantage of her desperate loneliness and then punished her for it: her dad, Robert, the muggle… and god knows how many others he doesn’t want to dwell on.

Another wave of protectiveness surges through him and it is really almost unbearable that he doesn’t know where she is or whether she’s safe. 

And he’s so tired. He shouldn’t have invited George. In the moment, it seemed important to have George there. George, who had somehow become his closest confidante. But then he’d shown up with a date, and what had already felt like a gross invasion of Rebecca’s privacy felt 100 times worse with a stranger in the room. 

They all stayed up as late as they could waiting for her then and then gave up and wandered to the bedrooms. Truthfully he couldn’t bear to go home until he knew she was safe. It had only been, what, a week since they slept together? But so much had happened inside him in these past few days. Now he wanted nothing more than to be there for her when she came back. 

To show her… to show her that her past didn’t matter to him more than her present. (And maybe — if she would let him be part of it — her future.)

_ Don’t be ridiculous. This is your perfect chance to walk away. No one would blame you if you dropped her now and moved on with your life. Remember? Your busy life? _

Rebecca’s room wasn’t what he expected. Really, he hadn’t known what to expect, but a boudoir full of giant plush zoo animals hadn’t been it. If ever there were a decorating scheme perfectly calculated to sink deep in his freshly thawed heart… without even knowing it, she’d made her bedroom a reflection of his personal sanctuary. Of course it reminded him of the zoo. Of course it made him ache to talk to her and ask her about every one of the animals. Where did she find them? Why did she choose a giraffe and a hedgehog? How did she feel about cheetahs?

He settled onto her surprisingly firm mattress. The pillows smelled intensely of her. He was too restless to sleep, back in the private hell of her perfume. So he rolled one way, then the other. And then he noticed it: something green sticking out from under the bed. Was that… a tail?

It was. Green and faux-scaly and attached to… an alligator? He hauled it up onto the bed with him. What kind of adult woman keeps a life-size plush alligator next to her bed? He felt the answer almost simultaneously to asking himself the question: the kind of woman who hates to sleep alone. Already the weight and bulk of the gator had settled on his chest. It wasn’t warm and it didn’t have a heartbeat, but if he closed his eyes and took a deep breath of her scent, it was almost like holding her. It was almost comforting. He wondered how many lonely nights she had spent curled up this way. How many of her tears had the gator absorbed?

Nathaniel buried his face in the green fur. A few more wouldn’t hurt anything.


End file.
